Jerusalem – Indirect peace talks between Israel and Hamas aimed at ending the war in Gaza and released the remaining Israeli hostages resumed on Wednesday in Egypt. President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, and his son -in -law Jared Kushner were should arrive in Egypt Wednesday to join the conversations, a source close to the file told CBS News.
The war was triggered by the terrorist attack led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, during which around 1,200 people were killed and 251 other hostages. Israeli officials estimate that 48 of these people are still captive, but only 20 would still be alive.
Since that day, the Ministry of Health of the Gaza Strip, led by Hamas, said that the war of reprisals in Israel has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Israel disputes this figure but does not provide any own estimate, and the United Nations consider the counting of the Ministry of Health as the most reliable information available, because Israel prohibited foreign journalists from operating independently in Gaza.
Ricardo Pires, spokesperson for UNICEF, a charitable organization of the United Nations for Childhood, said this week that what he calls the “disproportionate response” of Israel to Gaza has killed or mutilated at least 61,000 children since the start of the war.
UNICEF and the world charitable organization Save the Children, which cite data compiled by the Gaza Government’s media office, led by Hamas, say that in average, a child dies every hour in Gaza – or a “children’s class” per day, as Unicef says.
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Since the start of the war, Save The Children said that at least 20,000 children have been killed in total, which represents almost a third of all the Palestinians who died during the war.
Unicef spokesperson James Elder told CBS News that when he visited one of the besieged hospitals in Gaza this week, “the first thing I saw was all children who had all been killed by quadricoptera (military drones), then I entered a corridor and there were walls walls in all the corridors”.
“There was a boy who was bleeding on the ground and who was apparently there for five hours, then he was placed on a stretcher only for another child to be put in his place,” said Elder to CBS News. “Then I saw a little girl die. It lasted half an hour here in Gaza.”
The frightening number of deaths does not reflect the thousands of additional children who were mutilated and injured, or those who lost one or both parents during the war.
In a makeshift camp for Palestinian orphans in the southern city of Khan Younis, the CBS News team in Gaza saw some of the young faces behind these dark statistics.
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“I would have liked the war to be just a dream that I wake up and see my parents next to me,” said Deena al-Za’arab, 14, who lost her two parents.
“I have to stay together for the good of my brothers and sisters,” she added, “because now I have to raise them.”
Many children from the camp now spend their days doing the work of adults.
ARAT AWQAL, who was only 10 years old, promised her father that she would be a doctor before her death, but she is now focusing on her young sister.
“I just want to come back to what it was before,” she told CBS News. “Whenever we hear the sound of the missiles, my father was holding us in his arms, but now he’s gone and we are still afraid.”
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UNICEF claims that one in five children in Gaza suffers from acute malnutrition, and Elder stressed that the trauma inflicted on the youngest is not only physical.
“Children have not only lost dear beings – it is not only a question of seeing their mother killed, it is a question of seeing his mother die, then adding this level of trauma to the displacement – and we are talking about movement, it looks like a neutral or abstract term. This is not the case. It is violent. It is repetitive, and that also increases trauma.”
The UN estimates that around 90 % of the Gaza population, some 1.9 million people, were moved by force during the war, most of them on several occasions as the orientation of Israeli military operations has changed. More recently, Israeli defense forces ordered everyone to leave the city of GazaThe largest population center in the enclave, and to move further south, towards areas such as Khan Younis.
This has led to a new massive exodus, which, according to humanitarian workers, increased suffering in the region and made help with those who arrive, often without anything.
“Several hundred thousand people have left the north recently in recent weeks,” Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination Office on Wednesday, in Haley Ott from CBS News.
“The situation was already very tense,” she said, speaking on the phone from the center of Gaza. “They are even more so now. We see a lot of people living by the roads, planting tents by the roads … There are many people who fled on foot and, of course, could not take anything with them, which creates extremely difficult conditions in terms of hygiene, sanitation and that kind of thing.”
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At the camp for the orphans – all among the displaced – Gazal Basam, 12, told CBS News that she felt “such pain in my heart after losing my father”.
“I want to live as before the war,” she said. “But I know that life will never be the same again.”.
“I feel such pain in the heart after losing my father,” said Gazal Basam, 12, at the orphaned camp. “I want to live as before the war, but I know that life will never be the same again.”
And Tucker Reals contributed to this report.
